Christmas dismantled

I don’t know about you, but in our house it is traditional to have all the Christmas decs down by 6th January – it’s one of the many english traditions my husband introduced me to all these years ago.

As I am still on holiday I took the initiative to start with the dismantling of Christmas today. Why is it that the christmas tree (the artificial kind) never seems to want to go back into the box you took it out of only a mere 4 weeks prior? After removing all the baubles and other decorations, once I found them all that is, I prepared the area for the transportation of the tree into said box. The sofas got moved, as did a small side table and the dogs were told to stay out of the way, for fear of accidentally trapping them in the tree and subsequently loading them into the box. The tree disassembly could start. The top part – no problem, the middle part needed some persuasion to be separated from its bottom partner, and the bottom of the tree, well, it didn’t look promising to be honest. The majority of the bottom part just did not want to fit into the box, branches sticking out everywhere and the moment I stuffed one end into the box, the other end popped straight back up! Reinforcements, in the form of our teenage daughter, were called into action and with the two of us pushing and shoving and holding the sides of the box together in order to close it, we finally trapped the tree into its box! Happily it thought better off it and decided to stay in.

The house without all the Christmas decorations everywhere looks extremely bare now, and whilst normally by now I am getting sick and tired of all the decorations and am more than glad to pack them up, this year I miss them. I am not entirely sure why this year should be any different, but there it is.

Apart from the bare walls in our house declaring that Christmas is over, there is nothing like Valentines chocolates and Easter eggs in the shops to give you the message “Christmas is gone – let’s move on”. It is true what my Mum says; the shops start promoting these occasions earlier and earlier each year! Why would you want to buy Easter eggs in January? I think it takes the excitement away from these festivities; by the time Easter comes around everyone is sick of seeing (and probably eating) Easter eggs, not to mention that the kids have probably asked for every Easter egg sweet on the shelves by that time and expectations are high come the big day. I for one refuse to buy Valentines chocolates and Easter eggs as soon as Christmas is over.

I shall now get off my soap box and wish you all the very best for 2014!

Tammy’s right, that bokeh is great. Glad to see you are keeping blogging. We took our decorations down today too; the tree was finally starting to shed its needles. The living room seems much bigger than it was before. Happy New Year.

Happy New Year Ivor! Why is it that the rooms always look way bigger once the tree is down? I have never been able to figure that one out, especially when in a months time it will no longer look as big.

I like the colorful bokeh effect in the photo and that it’s of a single ornament. Things look oddly empty here too with all of the decorations put away. Usually I’m glad to have what has started to feel like clutter put away but this year I’m oddly wistful.

I’ll echo the comments of others – I really like the bokeh in this shot. Our decorations were gone before New Years (a personal family tradition). Unfortunately, the town hasn’t gotten around to picking up the tree…

Thanks Andy, glad you like the shot. Some years I wish the rest of the family would allow me to take down the decs straight after Christmas! Our town is also slow in collecting trees, seems to be a universal first world problem!